After about 18h of feeling completely run over by the hopeless feeling of a second Trump presidency, my fiance snapped at me "This hopelessness is exactly what he wants." As per usual, she is right - a complete nihilism about the possibility of things improving is how we got here and because it's how we got here, it cannot be how we get out.

We must throw sand in the gears, wrenches in the cogs. No, we may not be able to stand up and resist openly the way we did in 2018 if he is able to bring the might of the National Guard against protestors. That means that the resistance this time around is less about bodies in the street and more about malicious compliance.

"Immigrants? No, I don't know any immigrants." (when law enforcement asks if you know any immigrants)
"My wife? She's infertile." (if the fertility police that the evangelicals want materialize)
"Queer people? Never met em." (when the brownshirts go door to door to beat the queers)
"My friend Bianca has always been a woman." (when the bigots try to single out someone they think is trans)

Malicious compliance slows evil down, and it will absolutely be necessary as we build alternative structures. The Fedi is one - I do not think we would have the information ecosystem that we do if adversarial interoperability was baked into our current systems the way it is baked into the Fedi (i.e. I don't need my server admin's consent to switch servers or spin up my own - I just do that and they can go can it if they don't approve).

These alternative systems like the Fedi give me hope and the act of having hope is listening to Snyder's wise tenant "Do not obey in advance." (as one of the things they want you to 'obey' is that you SHOULD be feeling completely hopeless). The open display of hope is also a way of showing to the racists and bigots who loudly will support Lord Commander Marmalade that sorry, libs ain't weak.

Another thing that has given me a lot of hope - a LOT - is reading @pluraistic@mamot.fr's awesome essay "The true tactical significance of Project 2025" (July 14th, 2024)
pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/
This essay outlines some of the major fracture lines in the far right coalition and the major hammer to hit them with - worker power. We, at least everyone that I have seen on the Fedi, is a worker in some way shape or form, whether you work for yourself in the form of your own business or you work for others as a wage earner. The Fedi has the potential to serve as an amazing hub for worker organization as long as it cannot be forced into obsolecence by a corporate controlled platform like Threads.

So while the fuckers are gloating, and then stabbing one another in the back while they vie for power in the incoming administration, we must begin organizing, to build the last of the tools that will allow this to be a cross-racial, cross-identity bastion of worker power that can only be turned off by turning the entirety of the internet off, and to find the allies who are not here and bring them on board.

@kissane put out this call for participants in a study of Fedi users and server admins and I ask each person who has made it this far, participate
mas.to/@kissane/113450292914015236
The data that Erin and Darius have put together on trust and safety should deeply inform the tooling that is built out as the next part of the Fedi. Shared block lists, shared allow-lists allow us on the Fedi to turn our disparate islands into the digital equivalent of Armada that China Meiville described in The Scar - a floating, interconnected metropolis of boats that wanders the digital seas safely. Client side moderation would allow us on the fedi to help safely onboard members of more at-risk communities by giving them the tools to filter out the garbage nobody wants on their timeline.

My hope is that by the time one of the far right factions that are opposed to one another comes out on top in the inevitable power struggle over the next few months to a year, the Fedi serves as a lifeboat for the information ecosystem that we desperately need in these trying times - human filtered, human powered, and most of all, built by people and communities, not corporations. #FediMeta #MaliciousCompliance #CommunitiesNotCorporations #WorkerPower #Organize #KeepYourChinUp